32 similar outfit seems to feel compelled to adopt the same approach. Nonprofits don't have worries about dividends or price-to-earnings ratios, but other worries-about ways to preserve jobs, about the competition for talent and funds, about big-donor pressure to become "self-sufficient" -appear to have the same effect: they turn the failure to explore an opportunity to go after money into an unpardonable offense. What was most unsettling about the Bridgeport story was not the idea of a church's owning a university, or even the Unification Church's reputation for exercising a strong grip on the thinking of its members, although a number of university people-students and teachers-argued that this particu- lar body could not be trusted to uphold academic freedom as firmly as, say, the Roman Catholic Church has upheld it at Georgetown and Notre Dame. What struck us was the apparent readiness of an institution that had been one thing throughout its history (the school was founded in 1927) to become another almost overnight because of an offer of money. In the for-profit world, this sort of metamorphosis is common. Who raises an eyebrow anymore when, say, the American Can Company announces its decision to stop making cans, to rename itself Primerica, and to con- centrate on financial services? Or when MCA, the parent company of U niver- sal Pictures, accepts a takeover bid by one of the giants of the Japanese elec- tronics industry after years of legal battles against, and denunciations of, that industry? But the nonprofit world had seemed immune to such sudden wholesale transformations. Indeed, that immunity was what it had seemed to be all about. What unites nonprofit groups is a decision to be guided by a particular idea, whatever it may be, and to keep other considerations sec- ondary. This sort of constancy is in itself, it seems to us, a cause as worthy of support as any of the disparate causes around which such groups have formed. "Now, suddenly, the Moonies are not going to be a few oddballs on campus, they'll own the campus," a professor of engineering, Lawrence V. Hmurcik, told the Times after the Bridgeport negotiations came to light. If such a thing could actually happen, we wondered, what other develop- ments might follow? Would the Sal- vation Army go into the motel busi- ness? Would Alcoholics Anonymous make a hostile bid for control of the American Red Cross? It was a relief to learn, the week before last, that the trustees of the University of Bridge- port had decided not to go through with the deal, and we would like to think that what swayed them was something more than a belated discov- ery that their would-be purchasers were really offering only about ten million up front. . . Reunion A TALMUDIC proverb says that if a person saves one life it is as if he had saved the whole world We were reminded of this recently when we attended a bagels-and -sushi breakfast thrown by San Francisco's Holocaust Oral History Project to honor the Charlie Battery of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, an all- J apanese- American battalion, which liberated Dachau. Eric Saul, a historian who helped organize the event, eXplained to us that the 52Znd was part of the legendary 442nd (Go for Broke) Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated regiment in the history of the Ameri- can military and the one with the highest casualties: it received an aver- age of three medals per man and spearheaded some of the war's harsh- est battles. "The nisei-the second generation of Japanese in America- talk only among themselves and only very vaguely about their accomplish- ments," Mr. Saul said. "We keep finding out little secrets about the battles they won, the people they saved." The breakfast was shortly to be held in the project's offices, on the second floor of an old brick building south of Market Street, and the office walls were cov- ered with photographs of J apanese- American soldiers, sitting in jeeps, or eating their C rations, or pulling on helmets, or just goldbricking. Toll u NOVEMBER 11, 1991 Okazaki, who was one of a dozen enlistees from the Heart Mountain internment camp, in Wyoming, showed us a picture of his younger self, peering out from a group on the back of a transport truck. He told us that the soldiers who were from Hawaii liked to hand out nicknames. Leaning closer to a row of pictures, he pointed out Sluggo and Sharkey, then matched the photographs with white-haired men standing on the other side of the room. His own nickname, he said, had been Slack-Ass, but that was a comment on the fit of his pants rather than on his work habits. Mr. Saul said that the J apanese- American soldiers had been ordered by the Army never to reveal that they were the ones who liberated Dachau, and he speculated that the American government hadn't wanted men of Japanese descent to be seen getting credit for the liberation. "They were threatened with a court-martial if they told anyone, so most of them never did," he said. "Besides, many of the nisei had been brought up to observe the ancient customs of their parents: N ever bring shame on your family, never tell a lie, and never brag about what you do." We said we wondered why these men, a third of whom came out of America's internment camps, would have volunteered to fight for a country that had branded them enemy aliens. Rudy T okiwa, who was only six- teen when he left Poston, Arizona, Camp Two to join the 442nd, and was consequently one of the few men present whose hair was still black, explained, "When the government asked for volunteers, many of us got together and talked about joining the Army. We said that if we want to live in this country-and it is the only country we know-we had better show that we're as loyal as anyone else. If there are no volunteers, it will give the President a real good reason to say, 'It's a good thing we put them there. See-they're not loyal.' So we joined." Mr. Tokiwa added that his father, a First World War veteran who had subsequently been denied American citizenship be- cause he was Asian-born, was ridi- culed by other internees when his son enlisted. By ten o'clock, several hundred guests had arrived-among them some forty survivors of the Holocaust-and were